This week we give you another bunch of releases. Featuring Yellow Belly’s ‘deep, atmospheric music’. Chaos Emeralds and their ‘set of scuzzy emo gems’. The Orphaned Bees ‘Synth Rock with unusual beats, vocoders and guitars’. Bonnie Trash’s ‘sudden, swift dagger to the heart.’ ‘industrial / esoteric electronic alchemist’ Colossloth’s new album. Venamoris with it’s partnering of ‘The man who raised the bar for heavy metal drumming’ and ‘a beautiful woman’ who has ‘backed up legacy acts in Las Vegas and tried to break into Nashville as a singer/songwriter.’ A fascinating compilation from the Russian ANS electronic music creator and finally, Satori’s ‘journey through grinding rhythms, dystopian soundscapes and a fascination into what lies beneath the surface.’ Have a read and listen below, let us know what you think..
Yellow Belly – Ghostwriter
Cruel Nature
A slow languid glide through a landscape of dreams, clouds and frailty. This is dreampop and it’s beautifully sung in just more than a whisper. It lazily writhes its way into your soul. A night time trip into fragile love.
Chaos Emeralds – Passed Away
Cruel Nature
This sounds like it was dipped in a great big vat of fuzziness, saturated in the essence of shoegaze, dried by blasting pop at it in huge waves and then hit with a hammer to roughen all the edges, surfaces and anything else that may have been smooth. It’s great, slow, toned back and emotional. Have a listen, seriously, trust me.
The Orphaned Bee – Thinking Without Language
Bird’s Robe Records
The Gothic undertones and slightly off music held my attention on this record, the vocals are far more messed about with than is necessary and eventually I got bored with it. If big Goth prog rock synth and guitar grooves are your bag then you’ll like this. I liked roughly half of it and then it wore very thin.
Bonnie Trash – Mourning You
Hand Drawn Dracula
This is confusing, the music ranges from alt-rock, chugging metallic punk and fuzzy stadium filling Rock with a capital R. But for all it’s slightly left field away from the centre leanings with the music the vocal is just too nice. I mean no disrespect, it’s just not my thing, I reckon there’s a whole bunch of people ready to tell me how wrong I am, but that’s music, I can’t like everything and I’m fed up with just writing about stuff I love. So if this sounds like something you’d love, buy it. I won’t be.
Colossloth – The Harmony Knife
Cold Spring
There is no confusion here, this is focused in to the millimetre. Colossloth has created his best work yet, a concept album about the UNABomber. Yes, that’s right, the UNAbomber, and I am struggling to review it in the usual paragraph. So I will use bullet points from the notes I have written. It’s a mass, visceral and alive overtaking all, voices still there but drowned and smothered. The noise that starships communicating make, slow and destructive, then it becomes grinding and unstoppable, like standing in front of Godzilla advancing on Tokyo in the original horrible dark film. This sounds like a column of insects marching forward, ever forward, as the chrome tasting wind tears at them. Here the focus is on the unexpected and almost unwelcome beauty of the guitar, this fades into weird plucking sounds and static as the guitarist is, I can only assume, possessed and lost forever, drone becomes noise which becomes more noise. No cohesion, no balance, just chaotic sound. It’s beautiful underneath, it puts into my mind one of those speeded up films of a dead animal decomposing to dust, this is what we have, chaos with brief interludes of calm and beauty and then dust, that’s what we get.
Colossloth has triumphed, all he needs now is you.
Venamoris – To Cross Or To Burn
Ipecac Recordings
Now this is another album that makes my brain hurt. When the music drops back and Paula croons this is a wonderful record, when it gets industrial, gothic and fuzzy it’s nowhere near as interesting and loses me quickly. So what I’m saying is, Dave, get quiet and cool. Paula, sing your heart out, you only need the very basic of blocks to build on. So, it makes my brain hurt because it could be a masterpiece.
VARIOUS ARTISTS – Электронная Музыка АНС (ANS Electronic Music)
Cold Spring
I’ve heard of the ANS electronic music machine before, sheets of glass with tones hand printed onto then that can create a myriad of sounds at the same time. This is a fantastic voyage into Russian Electronic experimentation. It sounds weirdly spaced out to start with but as the tracks progress there is a playfulness to the sound, a warmth and weirdness that is uplifting. You get six tracks here, all different and all wonderful, imagine what other treasures there are to find.
Satøri – Pillars of salt
Cold Spring
This is the next stage of SATØRI’s mission to document the stupidity of our species. It’s not a happy shining jewel and it’s not an easy listen. It’s built on hatred, terror and destruction with crushed concrete and twisted steel providing the mettle. It’s bloody horrible to be honest. There’s what seems to be an ogre singing over the layers of dirty, nasty synths and drones as the beats hammer down like bricks on your head. For some of the time it is terrifyingly empty behind the noise, just like us, the void we try and exist in before it claims us back.
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Yellow Belly are on Facebook, Instagram and Bandcamp.
The Orphaned Bee are on Instagram and Facebook.
Bonnie Trash are on Instagram
Colossloth is on Facebook.
All words by Adrian Bloxham.
